Robert McKay: Blog

My politics

September 10, 2012

Posted at 12:19 pm

Due to circumstances that were, literally, beyond my control - and which I won't bore y'all with - it's been three weeks since I posted a single word. I've today updated my two ongoing novels, and shall herewith begin a run of several blog posts that I wrote while I was incommunicado. :)

This site isn't about politics, and my writing isn't political. Though Darvin and Cecelia Carpenter, and my other characters, have political opinions, which with only rare exceptions mirror mine, politics has almost never entered into my writing - indeed, I can't think of any instance offhand where it has (but then I am not capable of remembering every word I've ever written).

However, this is an election year, and just as I'm not ashamed of my Christianity, neither am I ashamed of my politics. And so I thought I'd make this one post to briefly state them.

If I have to boil down my politics to one word, it would be the Constitution. Unlike other countries, where governments either arise out of long centuries of trial and error, or else result from revolutions bloody or otherwise, the federal government of the United States exists solely because the Constitution created it. In other nations governments create constitutions; in the United States, the Constitution created the government.

There was no presidency until the ratification of the Constitution. There was no bicameral Congress until the ratification of the Constitution. There was no Supreme Court until the ratification of the Constitution. Without the United States Constitution, this country might not even exist, and if it did the national government would look very different.

But today the federal government largely ignores the Constitution which created it, and to which it is legally subordinate. Congress legislates without consulting the Constitution to see whether its acts fall within the boundaries the Constitution set. I don't believe that any member of Congress has ever, within my lifetime, risen to propose, support, or oppose a bill on the basis of the Constitution. Nor has any president - not even Ronald Reagan - explicitly set out to govern within the powers the Constitution grants the presidency. And the Supreme Court has arrogated to itself the power to decide what is and is not constitutional - and not merely that, to create new law which de facto amends the Constitution, even though that document grants the Court no such power and sets forth a very specific means for amending it.

The two major political parties do not differ by much. Both are socialist - the Democratic Party more so than the Republican Party, but again, not by much. Neither one has committed itself to advocating only those policies and programs which the Constitution authorizes, and members of both parties, both in Congress, the presidency, and the Supreme Court, have routinely created law or interpretations of law which have no basis whatsoever in the actual text of the Constitution.

What we need, then, is to abolish all that the Constitution does not authorize - no matter what it is. For instance, there is no authority whatsoever in the Constitution for a Department of Education, and it should therefore disappear from the federal government (and just think of how much money you would have in your pocket if that department ceased to exist, and taxes fell by an amount commensurate with its erstwhile expenditures!). On its face, any federal action, agency, or law which the Constitution does not authorize is unconstitutional, and is therefore, by definition, illegal.

All my politics comes down to one thing - return the federal government to its constitutional limits. I don't believe that'll happen. As long as the citizens of the United States a) don't have a clue what's in the Constitution, and b) don't give a flying flip, and as long as the two major parties treat the Constitution as a dead letter, this country will continue down the road to becoming a People's State. I'll be honest - my only hope is that I don't live long enough to see it happen.